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I think my pick, recommended by a friend, would be Jitsi, if I did any video conferencing.
Hmm. From the comments on the Bruce Schneier blog you posted:
While Jitsi's open source nature is great for privacy and whatnot, having used it for the better part of a year at my employer before abandoning it, I can say that its functionality and reliability is among the worst of any video conferencing solution I've used.
The other problem is getting people to switch software is hard. Zoom and Skype have critical mass, nobody has heard of Jitsi.
Free software harvesting your data isn't new of course, but what annoys me about Zoom is it's actually paid for above 40 minutes, but it still does all this shit. If I was going to pay I'd expect software not to do that.
Google knows everything about me already so I might try persuading friends to use Google Hangouts as they've all got Google accounts too.
Fox-
paid for above 40 minutes
I, too, had 'heard' of this.
It would seem if the nature of your video meeting is sufficiently mundane*,
the Host will receive a pop-up window** allowing a further free 40 minutes.*I hosted the quarterly RWMAG, (Ruislip Woods National Nature Reserve Management Advisory Group) meeting this week.
** I found the pop-up window, late, as it was concealed by Zoom, a couple of Libre Office documents, some pdfs and a Firefox window.
On terminating the meeting I was also offered a foc hour long meeting, as long as I scheduled it 'then'. I tried, but the response pop-up window never resolved.
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That may be so--as I say, I haven't used any of them. However, free software is definitely better politics, and, needless to say, the more people adopt it, the better it's going to get. A bit of initial inconvenience is a perfectly appropriate price to pay for that. It's certainly better than the ridiculous levels of data exploitation that people become victims of.
mespilus
Oliver Schick
I don't use video conferencing software myself, but I thought some discussion of it might be in order. Everyone suddenly seems to be using Zoom, which appears to be highly intrusive and exploitative software, like so much else at the moment. I imagine the other widely-publicised options are not much better. Obviously, people may not care much about the nature of Zoom, but I suspect a fair few don't realise quite what it does and wouldn't use it if they did. There's lots of easily-findable info on-line, but here's Bruce Schneier:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/security_and_pr_1.html
I wouldn't use it for this reason alone.
This is a fairly up-to-date chronological list:
https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes
Here's a list of video conferencing software:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/08/zoom-privacy-video-chat-alternatives
I think my pick, recommended by a friend, would be Jitsi, if I did any video conferencing.